Burnham-on-Crouch U3A

‘Our Patch’ 2015

This year we decided that once a month we would record the wildlife seen in a small local area (see map over). We chose different times of day for the visits and in order to see waders aimed for a time when the tide left mud exposed in the river. We were lucky on all our outings to have dry weather.

The year started well and on our first outing in January we saw a flock of 1000 Brent Geese; in February we spotted a lone Red-breasted Merganser swimming in the marina, and were surprised in October by the flash of blue as two Kingfishers flew above the water in the dyke and even more surprised to see a Redpoll shortly afterwards. In all, we identified 52 bird species.

Throughout the year we built up our knowledge of flowers although we were unable to identify a few of them. It was flowers that sometimes made our progress slow, as we spent a lot of time discussing them and consulting our books; outings usually took us around 2 hours. 74 flower varieties were identified. Between April and October we saw 9 species of butterfly. The only animal sighted was a Rabbit but we did see Muntjac slots in the mud in January. We tried to identify the trees, at first by their winter twigs and later by their leaves but didn’t record them. Fungus varieties were low and we only recorded the Shaggy Ink Cap. Of the reptiles we saw just one lizard although there were plenty of notices warning of the danger of adders.